


Alone

by ladymac111



Series: Interstellar Medium [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hanukkah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 07:18:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8965924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymac111/pseuds/ladymac111
Summary: It's Hanukkah, but how can it really be Hanukkah if Sam and Matt and Katie aren't here?  How can you celebrate a miracle when everything is so dark?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Quick headcanon notes:  
> \- Pidge's mom's name is ~~Laura~~ Gunderson -- updated 1/22/17 since we have from TPTB that her first name is Colleen  
>  \- she kept her maiden name when she married Sam because she was already using it professionally  
> \- that's why Pidge picked it for her alias because it was already a family name  
> \- ~~Laura~~ Colleen is Ashkenazi Jewish on her mother's side  
>  \- which makes her and Pidge and Matt fully Jews by the matrilineal rule

Colleen Gunderson used to love Hanukkah. And not the way she did as a little girl, when it was just about presents and sufganiyot. She loved it because it was warm, it was comfortable, and it always felt like coming home, even when home was hundreds of miles away.

Partly, of course, this was because the rest of the world was celebrating Christmas, and the festivity always bleeds together. And there will always be that memory of the first winter with Sam, when they were in grad school, teaching him about Hanukkah and seeing his delight in it, in the stories from her family's celebrations over the years. That was when she first thought she might marry him someday, and the next year, he proved her right.

And then Matt and Katie came along, and it changed for Colleen again, being the mom and creating all the magic, the decorations, the lights, the latkes, the candles. Teaching Matt to read with _Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins_. Teaching Katie the blessing as soon as she was old enough to be sort-of trusted with flame, hearing her get better every year, knowing when she started understanding the words, the language of her ancestors.

Colleen only ever felt really Jewish at Hanukkah, and it was a profound feeling, that connectedness with thousands of years of history. But this year is wrong. There's no joy, no light, no sense of where we came from, where we're going.

Because Sam and Matt and Katie are gone.

No, not _gone_. Merely missing. Not that that's much comfort either, but at least it leaves space for hope, even if she doesn't have any right now.  She hasn't gotten out any of the decorations.  A couple weeks ago she saw a box of candles at the store and had the thought that she ought to get them, but she didn't.  How can she light the candles without her family there?

She's staring at nothing, standing still in the middle of the supermarket aisle. A woman with a full cart and a babbling toddler pushes around her, humming along to the Christmas music on the store's sound system. It's that one song she really hates, more than the others.

Being alone in WinCo, grocery shopping for one on the first night of Hanukkah -- it's so unspeakably awful that she feels like she can't possibly continue. She could just stand right here forever, right? Staring at ... whatever department this is. Those yellow and blue things in the garishly bright cooler are probably butter.

Colleen blinks -- that's right, she came here for cream cheese, but there are so many that she got overwhelmed and shut down. She tries to focus again -- the one she likes is usually near the top of the display at this store.

She grabs it, drops it in the basket next to the sad bag of frozen bagels and carton of salad, and drags herself to the end of the aisle. She desperately wants to turn right, to go back out to produce and get ten pounds of potatoes and five of onions and then go home and make latkes for her family. But no one is there to eat them, to play dreidel and argue about probability instead of helping, to have that discussion yet again about how they could reconcile the miracle of the oil with science. They've never figured it out. Colleen has ideas, has had for years, but she doesn't share them because she loves hearing Sam and the kids argue about it and keeps holding out that they'll find one of her ideas on their own.

She turns left instead, walks mechanically through the meat department, refuses to turn down the aisle that has the kosher section at the end, and cuts through liquor to the self-checkout.

This isn't apparently enough to avoid kosher products though -- there's an endcap of Manischewitz and boxed latke mix and sufganiyot from the bakery.

Wine is even more tempting than potatoes were. But if she gets the Manischewitz she'll cry while she drinks it, and then she'll try to call her mother, but Mom died in July and nobody will answer the phone and she knew for years that this was coming, that before long she'd have a Hanukkah without her mother. Really, last year was a Hanukkah without her mother, the dementia was really bad, Mom only recognized her half the time and didn't know who Katie was at all. And last year Sam and Matt were gone too, on their mission to Kerberos. It was right before they disappeared. They and Takashi had sent a video message to her and Katie, and they sent one back, since the speed of light is too slow for a real conversation. It wasn't a great Hanukkah, but at least it still felt like Hanukkah.

But she had really hoped, _really_ hoped that Sam and the kids would somehow be back this time. Or at least Katie.

She turns from the Manischewitz to the wall of other red wines, the ones that don't remind her of her parents. Sam was always the oenophile, she never bought it herself, doesn't know the difference between the kinds. She grabs a cheap one that has a picture of a kangaroo on the label.

Isn't Hanukkah supposed to be about miracles? About a victory against impossible odds, about light when there ought to be darkness. This year the misery and the darkness and the impossibility is just swallowing up everything else.

They should come home. Hanukkah should have brought them back to her.

It's stupid to think like this. She drops the bottle in the basket and it would squish the bagels if they weren't frozen solid.

There's a line for the checkouts. This was a bad time of day to come to WinCo, she should have known better. She stares blankly at the Christmas tree behind the self-checkout supervisor until it's her turn.

She forgot her bag at home, so she has to pay fifteen cents for a paper one, and it doesn't have handles so she has to carry it in her arms.

It's chilly and wet outside, but too warm for snow. Just the right temperature for everything to be grey and slushy and disgusting.

Colleen sets the groceries on the passenger seat, starts the car, folds her arms on top of the steering wheel and starts to cry.

 


End file.
